Hello, my name is Kim Howell and I'm the owner of KidsMathStore.com. I'm a mom and a primary school maths teacher from London, UK. My profession is what prompted me to setup this website. Well that and the birth of my second child. I spend more time at home with the kids now, and I started missing teaching. Math is a scary subject for a large number of kids. In short, with this website I'll try to make math less of a bogeyman by sharing lessons, tutorials, tests and other tools to help kids in primary school learn math. As I already mentioned, next to being a maths teacher I'm also a mom of two. In my role as a mom I managed to make my kids crazy about math. We also have more "classic" fun like playing football, riding bikes, flying cheap drone with camera, etc. I'm saying that so that I don't seem like an overbearing parent.

Being good at maths isn't just important for school, for passing tests. Learning and practicing math develops kids brains, cognition, problem solving, all of which are needed later on in life. College education is these days needed even for entry level positions at many of the companies who are looking for employees. Many students find themselves at a loss when fist starting college. Reason for that is they haven't learn how to think the way that a college freshman should think. That's where maths comes into play.

I might have started off a bit too aggressively again. I'm a primary school teacher and here I am talking college and jobs. That's a bit too far ahead, but it's good thing to think about the future, even if it's far away. Again I'd like to point out that I do have fun with my kids. Just recently we went down to the park and had some fun time with a remote controlled camera drone. It has a follow feature where the drone would follow the kids. It was lots of fun, despite our batteries running out ending our park visit prematurely. Always wear lots of spares, we know that now.

So what exactly is KidsMathStore.com is and what are my plans with this website. Here I'm going to share with the world my methods of learning math, the same ones I use at school and at home. To get kids interested in math I use all the tools at my disposal. We're talking about Android apps, Windows programs, online resources- There are quite a bit of them, the apps, software and especially online resources where maths can be taught. I'm basically just a sidekick to people like Khan Academy. By that I mean that when my kids learn math they watch lectures on Khans Academy and they then ask me for help when they get stuck on something they don't understand on their own. On KidsMathStore.com I'll talk about these tools that can help kids learn math. Soon I will probably setup a store for math learning paraphernalia, booklets, guides, test examples, etc. We'll see how the website grows and what my audience demands are going to be.

Android

Android needs no introductions. It's used by pretty much everyone in our household. My husband is the only one with an iPhone since he needs it for work. I've therefore had experience only with Android. Due to its popularity, Android has lots of developers working on apps for it. Lots of different apps exist in the Play Store that can be used by kids of all ages to learn math. These apps make learning math a game to the kids and that is why I love them. We have cheap Android tablets and kids use them not just for math, but also for playing other games. Using Android apps is a sneaky way of getting kids to learn math, because they aren't even aware that I'm teaching them math, they think that they're playing games.

Windows

On our desktop PCs we're running Windows and there it's mostly just me that uses various applications for math training, among other things of course. We're talking software for generating math tests, equations, multiplication table problems, etc. They saved me lots of time when I was teaching. It would have taken a lot of time if I had to create test sheets myself every time my students had a test. Now that I'm only working with my own kids, I don't need as much tests as I once did, but these applications are still quite handy when preparing exams so I'll cover them and other interesting math learning software that I come across.

Online tools

Last but not least are the online resources. They are quite extensive and a very important for maths learning. I already mentioned one resource in particular that I'm using, the Khan Academy. Khan Academy has lessons that cover math from primary school all the way through college. What makes them especially interesting is the fact that these are video tutorials. Kids can be turned off by a large wall of text, especially if that large wall of text talks about math. However if you put a video in front of them that explains theory while applying it as the same time in a example, well then they have a much better attention span. Other online resources I use include test sheet generators (similar to Windows software), interactive quizzes, and more. Stay tuned for my future reviews.